006_Built-in Galley Kitchen & Equipment Details

Location : Japan
Type : Furniture
Year : 2025

When considering the kitchen, the key theme in this project is “relationship.”
When we think about relationships within a house, relationships with family and friends first come to mind, as well as relationships with the outside world and nature. This project attempts to reconsider these relationships through the kitchen.

In residential architecture, one important question is where the spatial center of gravity is placed. Here, “center of gravity” does not simply mean a physical center, but a symbolic center where relationships and shared experiences are concentrated.

In traditional Western houses, one of these centers was the fireplace. Traditional Japanese houses similarly had spaces centered around fire, such as the irori hearth. In many traditional dwellings, there was something to gather around, and this place often became the emotional center of the family.
These spaces had a strong spatial hierarchy. Like the center of a circle, they were also the places furthest from the outside world. Separated from external threats and connected to family presence, they provided a sense of security.

Modern architecture introduced a different tendency. Rather than organizing space around a fixed center, modern space often pursued continuity and freedom. Frank Lloyd Wright’s “organic architecture,” Le Corbusier’s “free plan” and “architectural promenade,” and Mies van der Rohe’s concept of “universal space” attempted to create flowing and continuous spatial relationships without relying on a singular symbolic center.

In the second half of the twentieth century, however, another center emerged within the house: the television. In both Japan and the West, televisions were placed in living rooms and family rooms where families gathered together. Shared time around television became one of the ways modern families formed relationships.

Yet the nature of these relationships differed from traditional ones. Traditional spaces were organized around “gathering around” something, while television changed this into a relationship of “looking in the same direction.” What was shared was not the television itself, but the images within it. Compared to traditional houses, this produced a weaker and more diffuse hierarchy. The modern exterior world was no longer seen primarily as a threat. Through large windows and television screens, it entered the interior together with light and information.

Today, smartphones have gradually replaced television. This has created another kind of centerless condition within domestic space. Unlike the hearth or television, smartphones do not gather people around a shared object or shared direction. Everyone can remain physically close while facing completely different worlds. Because the center now exists within personal devices, the house itself no longer requires a strong spatial center.

In some sense, this realizes the modern architectural pursuit of non-hierarchical space through technological means rather than architectural ones. At the same time, however, the relationships once supported by fireplaces and televisions must now be reconsidered in different ways. Relationships with nature may also need to be reconsidered after becoming increasingly distant from everyday life.

Thinking about why animals form groups can help us reconsider what family means. Animals gather together primarily for two reasons: protection from threats and access to food. When humans began walking upright and moved from forests into the savanna, food was no longer always consumed individually on the spot. With freed hands, food could be carried back, prepared, shared, and distributed within a group.
Cooking and eating together became one of the foundations of family and community.

In this sense, the process surrounding food may be one of the essential structures of human relationships. When designing a kitchen, functionality and aesthetics are naturally important. At the same time, it is necessary to carefully consider the relationships between family members, friends, and other people who will gather there.

What kinds of communication and shared activities will emerge around the kitchen?
In contemporary housing, where individualization and privatization continue to progress, reconsidering the kitchen may become an opportunity to reconsider relationships between people.

Relationships with nature can also be reconsidered through the kitchen.
Before the introduction of modern system kitchens, the primary cooking space in traditional Japanese houses was often located in the doma, an earthen-floor space similar to today’s entrance threshold area. The doma was a semi-exterior space connected not only to cooking, but also to agricultural work and many other daily activities.

It existed as an intermediate zone between inside and outside. Because of this condition, materials and objects from nature were constantly brought into the doma. There, through the use of water and fire, they were processed and transformed before entering the interior world of the house.

In this sense, the cooking space functioned as a place that transformed external and natural things into internal and domestic ones.

Even today, to think about the kitchen may also mean to reconsider the relationship between interior space and the outside world.

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